Paperless tickets could be a new hit with concert fans

Paperless ticketing was used by fans in the best seats at the… (Orlando Sentinel file )

September 16, 2013|By Jim Abbott, Orlando Sentinel

When pop crooner Michael Bublé performs at Orlando's Amway Center next month, the best tickets in the house won't be tickets at all — at least in the traditional sense.

Bublé, a Canadian singer known for Frank Sinatra-style swing music, is among the arena touring acts to embrace paperless ticketing, a process designed to thwart ticket scalpers and online ticket brokers who drive up the cost of concert seats. Typically, acts offer the most desirable seats as paperless tickets. In Bublé's case, that's 1,700 out of more than 11,000 seats.

In the paperless system, when fans buy a ticket online or at a box office, they receive a transaction confirmation. To enter an arena, the buyer must present the confirmation, a form of identification and the credit card used for the transaction. The credit card is swiped through a portable scanner to print seat assignments.

The Amway doesn't push for the system when booking shows, but will use it at the request of promoters and performers. At a February show by British progressive rock band Muse, for instance, seats on the floor were paperless. Upcoming shows by the Eagles and Justin Timberlake will have traditional tickets.

"We don't want to dictate business practices to the promoter," said Allen Johnson, Amway Center director. "That's his money and he's taking the risk. I don't think we should be dictating to a private business how to conduct their business."

Paperless ticketing is between 75 and 100 percent effective against online scalpers at the Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, Ark., said general manager Michael Marion. The venue presented 12 paperless shows in 2012 and already has offered 14 this year.

"So many scalpers are out of town, in Connecticut, New York, Los Angeles," said Marion, who also is president of the Fans First Coalition, a fans rights organization focused on improving fairness in the ticket-buying experience. "They are not going to buy a ticket and have to fly here to Little Rock to scan it to let three people in."

For proof, Marion points to the number of seats available for Verizon Arena shows at third-party ticket brokers such as stubhub.com. "I can go on StubHub and see how many tickets are available for our shows, compared to others, and ours is significantly less. We're trying to cut down on third-party sellers and I feel very comfortable that we are doing that."

Orlando's Johnson said there's a learning curve for fans and venues.

The Amway's experience "was an education issue with the public," he said. If concertgoers had paperless tickets, "they had to go to a special door because an employee at every door doesn't have the ability to print the ticket and swipe the credit card through a device," Johnson said. "It does take a little bit longer because we're usually just scanning a bar code."

At the same time, Johnson sees the advantages of the system. "I like paperless ticketing," he said. "I think it's the wave of the future. I think that five years from now you won't see paper tickets. It'll be like the airlines."

Paperless ticketing is not "the most customer-friendly thing in the world," said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of concert industry trade magazine Pollstar. It's more difficult, for instance, to buy tickets as a gift if the buyer's credit card must be used at the door. Likewise, if a fan was unable to attend the show at the last moment, paperless tickets would be harder to give away or sell.

Most touring acts are aware that paperless technology helps them as much as it helps the fans trying to avoid inflated ticket prices, Bongiovanni said.

"The general feeling in the music business, whether it's the artists, promoters or buildings, is that anything that can be done to recapture money being siphoned off by the secondary ticket market and share it among the people on the line for the show is a good thing," Bongiovanni said.

"Artists would look at the people sitting in the front row and feel like chumps because the tickets were priced at $65, but people sitting there paid $165 and that extra $100 isn't going into their pockets. That's part of the reason prices have escalated so much. The public was proving that the real market value was much higher than the artists were charging."

Marion, of the Fans First Coalition, says that paperless ticketing is the best way to keep things fair, despite the inconveniences.

"The only people who want to transfer tickets are the scalpers," Marion said. "The rest of us buy a ticket to go see the show."